Elsevier editors share their top reviewing tips - Part 1

Understand your position in the process

Good peer review can improve communication and propel knowledge; bad peer review can have a negative effect just as powerful. As a reviewer, understanding your position in the peer review process can help you write better review reports.

When manuscripts come in, editors first determine whether they are suitable to send for peer review, e.g. fir the aims and scope of the journal and contain all the expected elements. In most disciplines, reviewers can be hart to come by, so this desk rejection is an important way to avoid saturating the reviewers.

Professor Christina Trautmann, Editor of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms S’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre, describes the steps she takes: "Once I receive a new manuscript submission, I first read the letter from the authors, read the abstract and scan over the text and figures. I then check the manuscript via iThenticate  S’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtreto see if there are text sections overlapping with existing papers. After considering experts and checking the referees proposed by the authors, I send the manuscript to two referees."

When the review reports come back, Professor Trautmann reads them carefully, sometimes revising the language before sending them on to the author. The authors then work on the revisions, and the revised version may be sent back to the reviewers if major changes have been made. "Sometimes this process goes through several cycles until the reviewer recommends acceptance or finally rejection", says Professor Trautmann.

This process is typical across the board, with some editors opting for fewer or more reviewers for each paper depending on the journal and discipline.

The purpose of a review

Together, the reviewers and editors act as a filter in the publication process. "where to set the threshold line of this filter is difficult and requires great seriousness, instinct, and expertise." comments Professor Trautmann. "If the threshold of the filter is too low, a field may suffer from too many 'garbage' publications, and if the threshold is too high, small scientific advances that sometimes trigger bigger knowledge steps may be lost."

So a key role of the reviewer is to help inform the editor and guide the process. "Reviews should help the editor decide if a paper makes a significant enough contribution and if we should publish it," says Professor Urban Jermann, Co-Editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics. If the reviewer's evaluation is positive, we also see referee reports as a way to guide revisions of a paper.

And there's also another purpose, he says - one that's important for reviewers to remember. "It's a social contract that reviewers are willing to spend the time to review others' work," explains Professor Jermann. "Providing a forum for communicating about research, and in the process improving its quality, is a secondary objective of a journal, even for work that will end up being published elsewhere.

Are you the right reviewer?

That being said, it may not be wise to review a manuscript on a topic too far from home. When you receive an invitation to review, first check it's in an area you're comfortable evaluating - you should be sure you could contribute a high quality review. Editors appreciate it when you reply immediately, either accepting or declining with suggestions for alternative reviewers. This helps them in time-consuming process of finding the right answers.

"It's important to select reviewers carefully; this is something I spend a lot of time on," says Professor Jermann. "Reviewers should be knowledgeable in the are. We usually only go for one referee report, and perhaps a second if the decision is unclear; this means that as editors we have to spend more time selecting the right referees. Reviewing is time intensive and requires that people are willing to write the reports."

If you're a willing and able reviewer, you could benefit greatly from taking part in the process, as Professor Marjin Janssen, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Government Information Quarterly explains: "Incentives are important - if reviewers do a good job, they can join the editorial board. If they're really good, they might become an associate editor or an editor. It's important to let people know that they can progress with the journal if they do good work."